Your last three proposals mentioned patching, monitoring, and backups. Your prospect's last three problems were downtime, a scary phishing email, and a board meeting about compliance. Those aren't the same conversation, and that gap is costing you deals.
It doesn’t make sense: you had a good conversation. The prospect had a real need. They seemed interested. Then a few days passed and nobody followed up.
That is how a surprising number of sales opportunities disappear. Not because another MSP had a dramatically better pitch, but because the conversation stopped moving. So what’s happening?
Most MSPs we talk to do not lack ideas for marketing themselves. They write a LinkedIn post here, send out a newsletter there, and maybe sponsor a local business event when the timing feels right. The effort is real.
The results, though, are harder to pin down.
Managed service providers face a challenge that should resonate with businesses and organizations of all kinds: they often know their products and services too well, and therefore focus too much on the minutiae—instead of the benefits a product or service brings—when trying to make a sale. While this is never ideal, it can be particularly dangerous for your audience when you’re trying to educate them about cybersecurity, as they’re vulnerable without it.
Therefore, you must position your services not as impressive technological feats, but instead, highlight how they solve your prospect’s problems and assuage their fears. Let’s discuss how you can do so.
As an expert in your field, you possess a wealth of expertise and valuable insights that can resonate deeply with your target audience, encouraging them to engage with you…but this may not be enough. You still need your audience to consume your content for it to offer value to your marketing efforts.
The challenge often lies in effectively distributing your content across the various channels your potential clients will use. This is where the strategic art of content repurposing emerges as a powerful ally. Let’s review some best practices for squeezing every drop of value from the content you deliver to your audience.
Cold outreach has had a bad rep in modern marketing, but this reputation has not stopped it from being highly utilized and highly successful… when it’s done right.
Let’s review what you can do to make your cold outreach efforts more successful.
Marketing managed IT services, much like marketing any service offering, largely depends on the quality and applicability of your content and the topics it discusses.
As a result, it is essential to produce good content and address the topics your audience is most interested in learning about. Let’s discuss a few things that this could—and really should—entail.
I don’t have to tell you that, for the managed service provider, the sales cycle doesn’t have an end… it kind of just keeps going. While the finish line may seem to be signing a new contract, there’s a lot you still have to do to encourage continued and increased business with your new client. Much of it will depend on your ability to communicate with them.
From your sales team to all those who work with your clients regularly, everyone must remember a few critical practices when communicating with your clients and prospects.
There is an old saying that says, “the fortune is in the follow-up.” The saying is actually pretty accurate. Follow-ups have the potential to influence a customer’s overall experience with your company. How frequently you follow-up and the quality of your follow-ups can be beneficial - or detrimental - to your MSP’s long-term success.
Email is a hugely effective tool that you can use to boost your business’ marketing efforts, provided you use them correctly. If misused, however, email marketing can be less beneficial (or worse, actively harmful) to your business’ self-promotion.
Let’s determine how to balance between overdoing your email marketing and neglecting your contacts so that you can get the most value out of your efforts.
Communication is at the heart of marketing. If you want to successfully sell your services, you need to be able to effectively communicate their value to your audience.
Let me ask you a question: how much does your average client know about IT?
This question is an important one to keep in mind, as it can help keep you from creating an echo chamber where your marketing is concerned. Let’s examine the concept of an MSP marketing echo chamber, and what you can do to avoid one’s influence.
The Super Bowl is a time where people watching TV actually pay attention to the commercials being shown. Even non-football fans will watch - just for the commercials! Some of these advertisements shown are more memorable than others.
It’s been almost 15 years since Facebook opened itself up for the public, and not long after that, it gave businesses the opportunity to use the platform to communicate with customers, clients, and prospects. If you aren’t using social media as a part of your online presence, you are extremely late to the game.
A cold call is a useful way to initiate contact with a potential client… but having said that, it needs to be done properly. After all, we all know how frustrating unwanted calls can be, with so many spam calls still plaguing our telephones. So, what’s the key to successful cold calls in this age of call screening? Let’s break down the practices you should follow.
Recently, we have been sharing insights on some best practices regarding social media. This time, we’re going to discuss the primary function of social media: engagement.
By now, you should have run out of excuses and realized that social media marketing is essential to generating leads for your MSP. It’s simply time to do it. Fortunately, Social Media as a Service allows you to focus on your business, while your marketing agency uses social media to send leads in your direction.
Adding a Live Chat solution to your MSP website is one of the best things you can do. Not only will your clients and prospects love it, but your IT company will receive many benefits from doing so.
Let’s talk about it.
Sitting down to write content can be intimidating. There’s been a lot of stigma placed around the important role quality content plays in your business’ marketing success. With such a heavy emphasis on content, many MSP owners and IT team members feel they’re not able to produce the caliber of writing needed to constitute ‘quality content’.
Your content can serve a variety of purposes. It, of course, pulls traffic to your site and provides value to your visitors, giving them a reason to return and bringing you closer to a contact point. However, content can, and unavoidably will, also give your readership an impression of the “personality” of your company, through a variety of aspects. Of course, as a reasonable person, you want your website describing your business as a managed service provider to make as favorable of an impression as possible on those readers who very well could become clients in the near future. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you wish to get a complete examination of what message you are sending to your readership, here are some steps you need to follow.
